Student Intern position for asteroid mining project opens

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Planetary Resources is a small startup that is focusing on asteroid exploration. The company is concentrating primarily on decreasing the cost of exploring and mining near-Earth asteroids. We know from asteroids that have landed on Earth that these rocks are filled with materials like iron, titanium, even water and oxygen. PRI hopes to make robotic explorers that are significantly less expensive than what is currently being developed to do all the heavy lifting out in space, and bring the harvested materials back down to Earth. While it all sounds fantastically sci-fi, the student internship position that has just opened for this project is very real.

If you are unfamiliar with what the company is doing, the Planetary Resources job posting almost seems like the company is looking to shoot interns into space to mine asteroids. This gets even more unsettling when the first paragraph of the PRI philosophy reads “we will aggressively accept mission risk where appropriate.”

While intern abuse is a long standing tradition in companies all over the world, PRI will not be shooting you into space should you be chosen for the job. Instead, the company is looking for students that are already studying in a relevant field such as aerospace and engineering mechanics, and therefore better able to help design the systems that will be used in the process of mining asteroids in the future.

This isn’t the first time a job inquiry from Planetary Resources has caught our eye, either. Companies like PRI are advancing the way we see the world at such a rate, it is hard not to see job postings like this as a fragment from some sci-fi thriller’s viral marketing campaign. It is, however, very real, and a huge step towards mining near-Earth asteroids in the not-so-distant future.